Pippa Garner, a conceptual artwork provocateur whose radically modified shopper items — like a midriff-baring males’s “Half Go well with” and a ’59 Chevy with its chassis reversed — supplied witty commentary on gender, physique modification, American automotive tradition and the boundaries of high quality artwork, died on Dec. 30 in Los Angeles. She was 82.
Her demise, at a convalescent hospital, was confirmed by Christopher Schwartz of Stars Gallery in Los Angeles, which represented her. She had various well being issues, most notably continual lymphocytic leukemia, he mentioned. She had gone by means of gender transitioning within the mid-Eighties.
Although Ms. Garner’s drawings, sculptures and innovations sometimes had a satirical chew, they had been pushed not by any political agenda a lot as by her sheer curiosity about herself and the world she lived in. Consequently, they had been, sometimes, very entertaining.
Earlier than 2015, when she started an explosive run of exhibitions accompanied by the publication of two monographs — “Act Like You Know Me” and “Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf” — Ms. Garner was finest recognized for “Philip Garner’s Higher Dwelling Catalog,” a compilation of her fantastical, flagrantly pointless devices and equipment. It was printed in 1982, underneath her start identify, earlier than she transitioned.
The amount showcased, amongst different issues, lowrider curler skates, a birdbath Jacuzzi, a palm-frond umbrella and a tool for taking pictures rubbish out your kitchen window.
The guide made a splash, and Ms. Garner quickly appeared on “The Tonight Present Starring Johnny Carson” to advertise the “Half-Go well with” (whereas sporting it).
Ms. Garner briefly educated as an industrial designer and served within the U.S. Military as a fight artist throughout the Vietnam Warfare earlier than changing into a prolific photographer and sketch artist.
For years she made a residing offering exact, whimsical drawings of innovations, like these within the “Higher Dwelling Catalog,” for magazines, together with Rolling Stone, Esquire and Playboy. She preferred to level out that her work in these venues was seen by a whole lot of 1000’s of individuals slightly than the few hundred who may go to an artwork gallery.
“I feel it’s attainable to be a extremely inventive artist in any medium you need, and it may be a industrial medium,” she mentioned in a 2019 interview.
On the similar time, she pursued formidable, usually automobile-focused artwork tasks, lots of which had been misplaced or destroyed. One — a sculpture of an anthropomorphic automotive elevating its leg over a map of Detroit — obtained her expelled from the ArtCenter Faculty of Design in Pasadena, Calif.
Typically her journal connections converged together with her extra unconventional work. In 1974, Esquire journal funded, after which printed an article about, a piece she referred to as “Backwards Automobile,” for which she eliminated, reversed and reattached the chassis of a 1959 Chevrolet sedan in order that, when she took it out over the Golden Gate Bridge, it regarded like she was driving backward.
Amongst different automotive creations had been a “nauti-mobile,” a automotive with a yacht-like cockpit; and “The World’s Most Gas-Environment friendly Automobile,” a 1972 Honda powered by recumbent bicycles. (For her personal on a regular basis transportation, Ms. Garner most well-liked human-powered wheels, and she or he held a patent on a sort of push scooter.)
In current many years, in a sequence she referred to as “Shirtstorm,” she labored with T-shirts, printing one-off slogans on them, or ironing them on; amongst them, “Iraqi Horror Image Present,” “I’d slightly Butter myself than Higher myself,” “Nothing Exists That Wasn’t There in The First Place” and “These Are My Stays.”
Ms. Garner started her gender transition in 1986 after medical doctors refused to prescribe hormones to her with no therapist’s be aware, main her to take doses of estrogen obtained illicitly. In 1988, she bought a print by the artist Ed Ruscha, an acquaintance, to pay for breast implants. Later, she had a bra and panties tattooed on her physique.
She spoke forthrightly, if not at all times constantly, about her transition, generally recalling her discomfort with each facet of the identification she was born into, white and middle-class included. Most frequently she described the method as simply one other inventive experiment.
“With a intercourse change,” she mentioned, “you’re making a visible assertion.”
In her telling, this framing of her transition alienated different artists and trans folks alike, not less than initially. Nevertheless it additionally anticipated modern questions on what counts as artwork and the way we take into consideration gender — and it encapsulated her total way of living.
“Her physique, her life — it’s all supply materials,” Mr. Schwartz mentioned in an interview. “She lived it. It’s actual.”
Or as Ms. Garner herself put it in an interview in The New York Instances Journal in 2023: “I believed, with all this vitality that I used to be placing into altering shopper home equipment from the meeting line, can’t that be tailored to the human physique? If I can work with a waffle iron, why not the physique? I have already got one, and it’s for me to resolve what I need to do with it.”
Ms. Garner, who took the center identify Venus, was born in Evanston, Unwell., on Could 22, 1942, to Richard and Mary (Hubbard) Garner. Her father was an promoting govt with McCall’s journal. Her mom earned a grasp’s diploma in English after overseeing the house for a while.
Ms. Garner had a youthful sister from whom she was apparently estranged. A wedding to the painter Nancy Reese, who launched Ms. Garner to the artwork scene within the late Seventies, led to divorce. No info on survivors was out there.
Ms. Garner’s household moved across the Midwest when she was a baby, and although she drew and tinkered consistently, she struggled in class. She ultimately handed by means of a number of artwork faculties earlier than being drafted into the Military in 1965. As an grownup, she lived in Los Angeles, London, the Bay Space, Santa Fe, N.M., and Lengthy Seashore, Calif.; socialized with artists like Mr. Ruscha and Chris Burden; and labored with the Bay Space avant-garde collective Ant Farm.
Her work started getting wider consideration in 2015, when it appeared on the Spring/Break Artwork Present at Moynihan Station in New York. Solo exhibitions at Redling Gallery in Los Angeles adopted, in 2017 and 2018. Her first institutional solo present in Europe, “Act Like You Know Me,” opened on the Kunstverein Munich in 2022 earlier than touring to Zurich; Metz, France; and New York. Her first American museum solo, “Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf,” opened at Artwork Omi, within the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, in 2023.
Ms. Garner additionally participated within the Hammer Museum’s biennial in Los Angeles in 2023 and the Whitney Museum of American Artwork’s biennial in New York in 2024. A present present, “Misc. Pippa,” her second solo at Stars Gallery, opened in November.
She was identified with continual lymphocytic leukemia in about 2010. The situation was linked to publicity to Agent Orange, an herbicide utilized by the American army in Vietnam. Over the past decade or so she additionally misplaced her sight to glaucoma.
Interviews, like all the things, had been inventive alternatives for Ms. Garner, however her bons mots would have been far much less hanging with out their ring of reality. Requested final yr what recommendation she would give to a younger artist who regarded as much as her, she replied, “I attempted to set an instance that no person else can comply with.”
